12.21

“Yes, that is what the letters did, child.”

“Then what are you saying?”

Her aunt clasped her hands together as if in penitence. “I do not know the reasons your mother has not told you this before, child. Ha’ana is a wise woman, Ati’t par Nim, the cunning gray fox, her spirit animal. But you have a right to know.”

“I don’t understand,” said Chel.

“Your father was a wonderful man, a loving man,” Initia said. “He was dedicated to you and to your mother and to his family, and he wanted to protect them. But his wayob was the tapir, who, like the horse, is strong, not clever. He was a simple man, without the words to put into those letters.”

“My father went to prison for leading the people.” Chel tried not to sound condescending. “When he was imprisoned, he wrote those letters in secret and was killed for them. My mother told me everything that happened to him. Everything he did to fight for Kiaqix.”

“But now ask yourself who told you these stories,” said Initia.

“You’re saying someone else wrote those letters and my mother wanted me to believe that he did?”

“Not just you,” Initia said. “Everyone believed your father wrote them. But my husband was his brother, child. He knew the truth.”

“So who wrote them?” Chel asked. “Someone with him in prison?”

Sticks crackled beneath the hearthstones. “From the time your mother was a young girl, she was never afraid,” Initia said. “Not of the landowners or the army. She would walk up to them in the market when she was only ten years old and spit on their shoes. She rejected their calls to modernize us, to change our ways. She helped stop the ladinos when they wanted to change what was taught in our schools, when they wanted our children to learn their history.”

Chel froze. “My mother?”

“By the time Ha’ana was twenty,” Initia continued, “she was sneaking into the meetings of the elders. When the army hanged a young man from the balcony of the town hall, many became afraid. But your mother tried to convince the men to fight in case the army or guerrillas returned. She said we must arm ourselves. But no one listened to a woman. When your father went to prison, that’s when the letters began.”

Chel looked around at the stone hearth, the hammocks, the small wooden table and chairs on the sascab floor, the huipils hanging to dry. This was a place where Maya women had done their work for a thousand years. Not on the battlefield.

“Why would she lie?” Chel asked.

“Ha’ana understood her people,” Initia said. “She could rally the women, but no man would listen to a woman about the ways of war. To rouse the men to action, Ha’ana needed the voice of a man. When your father was imprisoned, it was the most terrifying thing that ever happened to her but also a chance to be heard.”

“But when he died, she left here. She left all of you behind and never came back. How could the person who wrote those letters leave?”

“It was not easy, child. She worried someone would discover what she’d done and come after her—and you. The only way to protect you was to leave everything here.”

“Why didn’t she tell me?”

Initia put a hand on Chel’s back. “They killed your father because of the letters, even though he didn’t write them. After he was murdered, your mother felt so much guilt. Despite the good her letters had done, she blamed herself for his death.”

Chel was in shock. She had punished her mother for her apathy, for abandoning the place she came from, and Ha’ana had never corrected her. She stayed silent, knowing how hard she had fought and how much she had lost for her people.

“Your mother is the gray fox,” Initia said. “Ati’t par Nim is always cunning.”

Chel had always thought Ati’t par Nim seemed wrong for Ha’ana. Now she knew better. The ancients believed that the power of the wayob was ubiquitous; they believed in its interchangeability with the human form, its dominion over life, its promise of a person’s potential. The fox made people believe what it needed them to.

Suddenly Chel thought of something. She darted over to one of the supply bags, digging through until she found her codex translation.

“Is everything all right, child?” Initia asked.

Chel had assumed Paktul led the children from Kanuataba into the jungle, to a place in the forest where his ancestors had once lived. Yet throughout the codex, the scribe confl ated his human form with his animal form—his spirit animal. And Chel and her team had been unable to reconcile why the oral history spoke of an Original Trio who’d escaped the Lost City rather than a foursome composed of Paktul, Smoke Song, and the two girls.

But what if Paktul the man hadn’t made it out with them?

* * *

WHEN STANTON returned to the main house, Chel had energy in her voice that he hadn’t heard since they’d sat in the Getty plaza together. “I think we’ve been looking for the wrong thing. Lake Izabal doesn’t have anything to do with where the trio went.”

“What do you mean?”

“Paktul isn’t writing about his human ancestors. It’s right here in the translation. He uses the word I interchangeably with his spirit animal. He goes back and forth using I to refer to his human form and his wayob. But we know he was keeping an actual macaw with him in the cave, because he refers to other people who can see it. He shows it to the prince and Auxila’s daughters, and he writes about the bird rejoining its flock.”

I told the prince my spirit animal had stopped in Kanuataba on the great path of migration every macaw makes with its flock, Paktul wrote. I told him that in weeks we would continue our journey in search of the land that our ancestor birds have returned to every harvest season for thousands of years.

“When he says he’ll lead them in the direction of his ancestors,” Chel said, “I thought that meant his human family. But what if he never went anywhere? What if he was killed by the guards, as he predicted, or he stayed behind to make sure the children could escape?”

“Who led the children to Kiaqix?” Stanton asked. “You think they followed a bird?”

“The prince would’ve been trained to track game a hundred miles. And the macaw would instinctively have returned to its flock. Kiaqix means the Valley of the Scarlet Macaw. It’s right along the migration path. The oral history says that the Original Trio considered it a good omen when they saw so many macaws in the trees here. What if they were following one of them because they believed it was the spirit of Paktul?”

Chel pulled out the latitude map. On it she’d drawn a line representing the macaws’ known migratory path. “During migration seasons, the macaws fly from the southwest to here,” she continued, “and the patterns are highly consistent. We can find the exact trajectory and follow it.”

For most of Stanton’s adult life, the possibility that three children followed a bird a hundred miles would have sounded insane. Now he didn’t know what to believe, but however improbable it was, all he could do was trust Chel’s instincts. If they had to track a migration pattern into the jungle, then that’s what they’d do.

“Are you sure this is the exact path?” Stanton asked.

Chel reached down into the supply bag and pulled out the satellite phone. “I found three different sites online, all giving the same coordinates. You can see for yourself.”

She handed Stanton the phone, but when he tried to power it up again, the screen remained blank. It had been dying for hours, and the last bit of juice was gone. Cutting them off from the world entirely.

“It doesn’t matter,” Chel told him, pointing back at the map. She seemed almost manic. “We have what we need.”

Then Stanton saw something in her eyes that stopped him cold.

“Look at me for a second,” he said.

Chel was confused. “I am looking at you.”